verbal packaging. Even though earlier descriptions of The Réal are often more amusing for their gross discrepancy with the final product, these more recent liner notes offer a greater insight into the authors' intentions. What is the genre of a CD-ROM that is neither a game nor an art piece? How do you sell an unwelcome experience without preaching to the converted or attempting to convert the healthy skeptic? Watch us wrestle with these questions in the following excerpts.
Feb 8, 1997
The Motel Réal, Las Vegas, NV
The pages of this "digital" scrapbook are full of hidden meanings and invite you to re-read them like any other comic book, graphic novel, or visual joke. There are real people and places in the mix and there are also confabulated scenarios and characters. Archeologist of the factual and historical Las Vegas will find the Motel Réal, Las Vegas, NV. a bit too parabolic to reflect any meaningful reality. Similarly, science-fiction fanatics may find the "human, all too human" pacing of some of our stories too melodramatic to launch them into an alternate dimension of aliens, UFOs, and/or Atlantis.
Nonetheless, the 52 rooms of the Motel Réal, Las Vegas, NV. are, indeed, occuppied by aliens, flying saucers, ancient and lost civilizations, black maids, mafiaso dons, redneck security guards -- in short, all the fabulous personae of our social register; the kind of people you come to (expect to) see in a Las Vegas story.
Scholars searching for a copious tome on the in's and out's of Las Vegas should turn elsewhere. We have not exhausted this "city of lights;" we are, instead, exhausted by it. The brevity of our collection stems from still-fresh memories, bad memories, of overstaying our welcome in Vegas. We do not recommend experiencing any sort of duration in Las Vegas.
Please read our light, very light anecdotes and illustrated scraps of stories quickly, hastily. There is nothing to see here, please move on.
Mar 1, 1997
The Réal, Las Vegas, NV
Sometime -- who knows when -- the winds will rise and sand will swallow whole the city of Las Vegas.
What happened? What if it's now the year 2033 and the secret of Vegas lies in an electronic scrapbook? Imagine this scrapbook is a hand-cranked slot machine storyteller built up, piece by piece, over the course of fifty lonely years by the quietest man who ever died in Vegas: a curmudgeony custodian -- the "curator" of the deserted Motel Réal.
His secret, the secret of everyone who goes to Vegas, lies in you hands, glows on your screen, rolls by as the time passes away 52 stories, inside 52 rooms, through 52 rumors that keep you in the peculiar presence of The Réal's Las Vegas.
With so many cards in the deck and so many games to play through, how do you say who's telling the truth about Las Vegas? Is it the Jemima robot maid? The dapper bellhop in drag? The cocky cocktail waitress? The modest dealer -- or is the secret hidden deep inside the bartender's peg leg? Liars or soothsayers, the people inside The Réal, Las Vegas, NV are keepsakes not clues.
Told through tabloid clippings, drawings scribbled on napkins, electronic toys coded by the hand of an idiot, the bitterly ironic world of The Réal is always a quick hand away from slipping back into the silent desert. This house of hand-drawn cards is full of telling questions, not flat answers. Why else was the Motel Réal left standing as the rest of Vegas sank under a mile of sand?
Colored like a Western, a cheap card trick, an impatient parable, The Réal unravels at the slightest touch of your hand, delicately, over the course of a dozen sittings. How much comfort you take in this inn depends on how lightly you're willing to skim the surface of every face and every word. Rest assured, if there are fantasy worlds hiding within The Réal's labyrinth, they are etched on the backside of the paper walls that line our real world.
This is not an action-adventure game. This is not a fantasy role-playing game. This is not even a detective story or a romance novel. The Réal, Las Vegas, NV. is nothing more and nothing less than Las Vegas, itself -- whatever that means to you.
Does Vegas excite you? Does Vegas offend you? Does Vegas scare you? Come, stay for a while at the The Réal. Your viewing pleasure is our top priority. Rest. When the sands of time finally drown out the real Las Vegas, you will still have The Réal, Las Vegas, NV.